We're all going to die....and it's Bushco's fault

The findings of the new NIE should come as no surprise to anyone. What is truly stunning is that it has taken the so-called "Intelligence community" this long to figure it that invading and occupying Iraq would be the worst possible response to 9/11 and al Qaeda.

But then it wasn't done in response to 9/11 and al Qaeda. It was in response to PNAC and the NeoCons, if there is actually a difference.

Intelligence Puts Rationale For War on Shakier Ground

By Michael Abramowitz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 18, 2007; A05

The White House faced fresh political peril yesterday in the form of a new intelligence assessment that raised sharp questions about the success of its counterterrorism strategy and judgment in making Iraq the focus of that effort.

Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush has been able to deflect criticism of his counterterrorism policy by repeatedly noting the absence of any new domestic attacks and by citing the continuing threat that terrorists in Iraq pose to U.S. interests.

But this line of defense seemed to unravel a bit yesterday with the release of a new National Intelligence Estimate that concludes that al-Qaeda "has protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability" by reestablishing a haven in Pakistan and reconstituting its top leadership. The report also notes that al-Qaeda has been able "to recruit and indoctrinate operatives, including for Homeland attacks," by associating itself with an Iraqi subsidiary.

These disclosures triggered a new round of criticism from Democrats and others who say that the administration took its eye off the ball by invading Iraq without first destroying Osama bin Laden's organization in Afghanistan.

Confronted with a political brush fire, the president and his aides retreated to familiar ground, highlighting the parts of the report that they saw as supportive of their policies, particularly the need to confront Islamic radicals on the ground in Iraq.

In talking with reporters in the Oval Office yesterday, Bush concentrated on a single paragraph in the assessment that placed the enemy in Iraq in a larger context of international terrorism. The estimate said bin Laden's organization will "probably seek to leverage the contacts and capabilities of al-Qa'ida in Iraq, its most visible and capable affiliate and the only one known to have expressed a desire to attack the Homeland."

Although only a portion of the instability in Iraq is attributed to al-Qaeda and the group had no substantial power base there before the U.S. invasion, Bush again cast the war as a battle against its members, whom his aides have described as key provocateurs there.

"These people have sworn allegiance to the very same man who ordered the attack on September the 11th, 2001: Osama bin Laden," the president said. "And they want us to leave parts of the world, like Iraq, so they can establish a safe haven from which to spread their poisonous ideology. And we are steadfast in our determination to not only protect the American people, but to protect these young democracies."

Bush's top advisers also pushed back at the proposition from many Democrats that the White House allowed the pursuit of al-Qaeda to be diverted by going after Saddam Hussein. Briefing reporters yesterday, Frances Fragos Townsend, Bush's homeland security adviser, took issue with the suggestion that the president had ignored warnings from the intelligence community that attacking Iraq would stimulate al-Qaeda's drive for recruits and influence.

"You're assuming it's a zero-sum game, which is what I don't understand," Townsend said. "The fact is, we were harassing them in Afghanistan, we're harassing them in Iraq, we're harassing them in other ways, non-militarily, around the world. And the answer is, every time you poke the hornet's nest, they are bound to come back and push back on you. That doesn't suggest to me that we shouldn't be doing it."

But many Democrats questioned the administration's explanations, seizing on the key judgments of the new intelligence estimate as yet another reason to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq and changing the administration's mission of the past four years.

Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) said the current situation in Iraq "has helped to energize" al-Qaeda. "Changing our strategy in Iraq and narrowing our military mission to countering al-Qaeda terrorism -- as a bipartisan majority in the Senate now favors -- would be the single greatest thing we could do to undermine al-Qaeda's ability to use Iraq as a recruiting and propaganda tool fueling the growth of regional terrorist groups," he said in a statement.

Al-Qaeda's participation in the Iraqi violence has figured particularly heavily in recent administration arguments for a continued U.S. troop presence there, because White House strategists regard it as a politically salable reason for staying and continuing to fight.

Some terrorism analysts say Bush has used inflated rhetoric to depict al-Qaeda in Iraq as part of the same group of extremists that attacked the United States on Sept. 11 -- noting that the group did not exist until after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. These analysts say Bush also has overlooked the contribution that U.S. actions have made to the growth of al-Qaeda in Iraq, which has been described as kind of a franchise of the main al-Qaeda network headed by bin Laden.

Paul R. Pillar, a former CIA analyst who has been involved in previous intelligence estimates, said that the administration has correctly identified the danger posed by al-Qaeda in Iraq and that there are indeed links between the Iraq group and the larger international terrorist network. But he said the White House is drawing the wrong conclusion, and argued instead that it is the U.S. presence in Iraq that is fueling the terrorists' cause.

"Iraq matters because it has become a cause celebre and because groups like al-Qaeda in Iraq and al-Qaeda central exploit the image of the United States being out to occupy Muslim lands," Pillar said.

Referring to al-Qaeda in Iraq, Clinton administration official Daniel S. Benjamin, who has written books and articles on international terrorism, said: "These are bad guys. These are jihadists." He added: "That doesn't mean we [should] stay in Iraq the way we have been, because we are not making the situation any better. We're creating terrorists in Iraq, we are creating terrorists outside of Iraq who are inspired by what's going on in Iraq. . . . The longer we stay, the more terrorists we create."

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

The Democratic Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee contradicted the White House's assessment of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq today.

In a statement sent to RAW STORY, Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-TX) warned that the President's plan to escalate the number of American troops in Iraq could be based on stale intelligence.
Calling the four-month delay of the release of the National Intelligence Estimate "unacceptable," Reyes contradicted a key White House claim about the basis for Bush's "New Way Forward in Iraq."

"Unfortunately for the troops he is now sending into harm's way, the President's plan was developed without the benefit of a fully vetted National Intelligence Estimate," Reyes said in the statement.

He added, "Further, because this NIE does not contain the most recent intelligence as to the situation on the ground, there is a concern that its assumptions will be stale and its analysis overtaken by events."

In a press conference on the release of the NIE earlier today, President George W. Bush's National Security Adviser said that the plan to send 21,500 additional troops to Iraq was based on well-founded intelligence.

"I'd like to draw your attention to -- in terms of the question I think you're going to have, which is, what is the mirroring up or the match-up between this intelligence judgments and the president's strategy?" Hadley said, and then pointed to events he said the NIE anticipated, particularly the recent battle between a Shi'ite militia and Iraqi soldiers in Najaf.

In his statement, Reyes also pledged further oversight. "Our Committee plans an aggressive series of hearings over the coming weeks to address the intelligence challenges in Iraq. We will scrutinize the conclusions reached by the Intelligence Community and seek to understand whether we are fielding the best intelligence capability," he said.

Reyes's Republican counterpart on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Pete Hoekstra, said in an earlier statement today "The latest Iraq NIE in many respects tells us what we already know. The situation in Iraq is extraordinarily difficult."

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Long Awaited NIE On Iraq; Perilous Situation

Surprise, Surprise!


By Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus,
February 2, 2007; A01

A long-awaited National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, presented to President Bush by the intelligence community yesterday, outlines an increasingly perilous situation in which the United States has little control and there is a strong possibility of further deterioration, according to sources familiar with the document.

In a discussion of whether Iraq has reached a state of civil war, the 90-page classified NIE comes to no conclusion and holds out prospects of improvement. But it couches glimmers of optimism in deep uncertainty about whether the Iraqi leaders will be able to transcend sectarian interests and fight against extremists, establish effective national institutions and end rampant corruption.

The document emphasizes that although al-Qaeda activities in Iraq remain a problem, they have been surpassed by Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence as the primary source of conflict and the most immediate threat to U.S. goals. Iran, which the administration has charged with supplying and directing Iraqi extremists, is mentioned but is not a focus.

Completion of the estimate, which projects events in Iraq over the next 18 months, comes amid intensifying debate and skepticism on Capitol Hill about the administration's war policy. In a series of contentious hearings over the past two weeks, legislators have sharply questioned Bush's new plan for the deployment of 21,500 additional U.S. troops and the administration's dependence on the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

In acid remarks yesterday to Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the departing U.S. commander in Iraq, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) noted that "things have gotten markedly and progressively worse" during Casey's 2 1/2 -year tenure, "and the situation in Iraq can now best be described as dire and deteriorating. I regret that our window of opportunity to reverse momentum may be closing." Casey was appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee on his nomination to be Army chief of staff.

Although McCain supports the additional troop deployments, he has proposed a Senate resolution including stringent benchmarks to gauge the progress of the Iraqi government and military. McCain's resolution and other nonbinding, bipartisan proposals that would express varying degrees of disapproval of Bush's plan will be debated on the Senate floor next week.
Legislators have been equally critical of the intelligence community, repeatedly recalling that most of the key judgments in the October 2002 NIE on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were wrong. That assessment concluded that Saddam Hussein had amassed chemical and biological weapons and was "reconstituting" his nuclear weapons program. It became the foundation of the Bush administration's case -- and congressional authorization -- for invading Iraq.

"One of the sort of deeply held rumors around here is that the intelligence community gives an administration or a president what he wants by way of intelligence," Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) told Navy Vice Adm. John M. McConnell, Bush's nominee to be director of national intelligence, during McConnell's confirmation hearing yesterday.

Without directly accepting Feinstein's premise, McConnell replied that the intelligence community had learned "meaningful" lessons over the past several years and that "there's very intense focus on independence." McConnell and others made clear that the new NIE on Iraq had been subjected to extensive competitive analysis to test its conclusions.

One senior congressional aide said the NIE had been described to him as "unpleasant but very detailed." A source familiar with its language said it contained several dissents that are prominently displayed so that policymakers understand any disagreements within the intelligence community -- a significant change from the 2002 document, which listed most key dissents in small-type footnotes.

Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.), vice chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, pointedly told McConnell that "we are not going to accept national security issue judgment[s] without examining the intelligence underlying the judgments, and I believe this committee has an obligation to perform due diligence on such important documents." Previous committee attempts to obtain material to back up a 2005 NIE on Iran, Bond said, had "run into resistance."

The outgoing director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, briefed the president on the Iraq NIE yesterday, and the document will be made available to Congress early today. A two-page declassified version of its key judgments will then be posted on the DNI Web site.
Sources familiar with the closely held estimate agreed to discuss it in general terms yesterday on the condition that they remain anonymous and not be directly quoted. But Negroponte and others in the intelligence community have made frequent references to its conclusions in recent testimony.

On Tuesday, Negroponte referred to the NIE in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "Iraq is at a precarious juncture. That means the situation could deteriorate, but there are prospects for increasing stability" that depend on the commitment of Iraqi government and political leaders to take steps to end Sunni-Shiite violence and "the willingness of Iraqi security forces to pursue extremist elements of all kinds," he said.

Congress, which requested the Iraq NIE last August, has pressured the intelligence community to complete it in time for consideration of Bush's new strategy. Intelligence officials have insisted that their best experts were working on the project at the same time they were meeting the demands of policymakers for current intelligence reports.

NIEs comprise input from across the community and are written by the National Intelligence Council.

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Where is the NIE on troop escalation?

Can they get by with another mere White-paper, if Congress is given, even, that, in place of a real NIE?

Have you noticed?

Neither President George W. Bush nor Vice President Dick Cheney have cited any U.S. intelligence assessments to support their fateful decision to send 21,500 more troops to referee the civil war in Iraq.

This is a far cry from October 2002, when a formal National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) was rushed through in order to trick Congress into giving its nihil obstat for the attack on Iraq. Why no intelligence justification this time around? Because there is none. Having successfully cooked intelligence four years ago to get authorization for war, the Bush administration has zero incentive to try a repeat performance.

Nor is there any sign that the new Democratic chairmen of the Senate and House intelligence committees will even think to ask the intelligence community to state its views on the likely effect of the planned “surge” in troop strength. This, even though an NIE on Iraq has been “almost ready” for months.

For the Bush administration, it has been difficult enough whipping its fickle but ultimately malleable generals into line. The civilian intelligence chiefs have proven more resistant. So the White House is playing it safe, avoiding like the plague any estimate that would raise doubts about the wisdom of the decision to surge. And that is precisely what an honest estimate would do.

With “sham-dunk” former CIA director George Tenet and his accomplices no longer in place as intelligence enablers, the White House clearly prefers no NIE to one that would inevitably highlight the fecklessness of throwing 21,5000 more troops into harm’s way for the dubious purpose of holding off defeat for two more years.

From Mushroom Cloud to Lead Balloon

The NIE, which leaned so far forward to support the White House’s warnings of a made-in-Iraq “mushroom cloud,” remains the negative example par excellence of corrupted intelligence. The good news is that Tenet and his lackeys were replaced by officers who, by all indications, take their job of speaking truth to power seriously. Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis, Tom Fingar, is a State Department professional not given to professionally selling out. And his boss, John Negroponte, is too smart to end his government career by following the example of his servile predecessors in conjuring up “intelligence” to please the president—not even for a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Unvarnished NIEs sent to the White House by the Negroponte/Fingar team have not shied away from unwelcome conclusions undercutting administration claims, and have gone over like proverbial lead balloons. An estimate on Iran completed in early 2005, for example, concluded that the Iranians will not be able to produce a nuclear weapon before “early to mid-next decade,” exposing Cheney’s fanciful claims of more proximate danger. And an NIE produced in April ‘06 on global terrorism concluded that the invasion of Iraq led to a marked increase in terrorism, belying administration claims that the invasion and occupation had made us “safer.”

Worse still from the administration’s point of view, patriotic truth-tellers (aka leakers) inside the government apparently decided that administration rhetoric on both of these key issues had deliberately misled the American people, who were entitled to know the truth. The two unwelcome estimates meant two strikes on Negroponte.

Then the White House learned of an impending strike-three—this one an NIE assessing the future in Iraq and apparently casting doubt on the advisability of U.S. escalation. In a classic Cheneyesque pre-emptive strike, the estimate was put on hold; Negroponte was given a pink slip and assigned back to the State Department. There are rumors that Fingar is clearing out his desk as well. NIEs Can Be Important National Intelligence Estimates are the most authoritative genre of analytical product, embodying substantive judgments on key national security issues. They are coordinated throughout the 16-agency intelligence community and then signed by the Director of National Intelligence in his statutory capacity as chief intelligence adviser to the president.

In times past, presidents and their senior advisers actually read them and often took their judgments into account in the decision making process. There have been good estimates, and bad ones. In the latter category, an NIE of Sept. 19, 1962, entitled “The Military Build-Up in Cuba” estimated that the Soviet Union would not introduce strategic offensive missiles into Cuba (even while such missiles were en route). Embarrassing, but an honest mistake.

The NIE issued on Oct. 1, 2002, 10 days before the congressional vote on the war, was dishonest from the get-go. It was prepared by spineless functionaries eager to please their boss (Tenet) and his boss (Bush) by parroting the faith-based analysis of senior analyst Dick Cheney. It is by far the worst NIE ever produced by the U.S. intelligence community.

But, hey, it achieved its primary purpose of scaring Congress into approving a war of aggression. In the wake of that debacle, few of us intelligence alumni harbored much hope that honesty could be re-introduced into the estimative process any time soon. Former CIA Director Stansfield Turner went so far as to tell a TV host that he thought the CIA should be “dismantled.” Thus, it was a very welcome surprise to learn, thanks to patriotic truth-tellers, of the gutsy judgments of more recent NIEs—and to discover that a remnant of analysts of the old truth-to-power school have been able to ply their trade unencumbered under Fingar and Negroponte.

Some History:

Estimates on Vietnam.

As one of the intelligence analysts watching Vietnam in the sixties and seventies, I worked on several of the NIEs produced before and during the war. All too many bore this title: “Probable Reactions to Various Courses of Action With Respect to North Vietnam.” Typical of the kinds of question the president and his advisers wanted addressed: Can we seal off the Ho Chi Minh Trail by bombing it? If the U.S. were to introduce X thousand additional troops into South Vietnam, will Hanoi quit? Okay, how about XX thousand? Our answers regularly earned us brickbats from the White House for not being “good team players.” But in those days we labored under a strong ethos dictating that we give it to policymakers straight, without fear or favor. We had career protection for doing that. And—truth be told—we often took a perverse delight in it. Our judgments (the unwelcome ones, anyway) were pooh-poohed as negativism; and policymakers, of course, were in no way obliged to take them into account. The point is that they continued to be sought.

Not even Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon would be likely to decide on a significant escalation without seeking our best guess as to how U.S. adversaries would likely react to this or that escalatory step

What About Now? As noted above, an intelligence estimate on Iraq has been in process for months—and months—and months. It is not that the analysts are slower these days; it is that the White House has decided that, for political reasons, no estimate at all is better than an unwelcome one. The White House thought process seems to be this: With Fingar and Negroponte and their benighted ideas about fact-based, rather than faith-based, intelligence analysis, it is far better to duck the issue altogether—at least for as long as the congressional oversight committees continue to slumber.

Besides, if Cheneyesque pressure were again to be applied to intelligence analysts, there is a growing risk that this might turn some of them into patriotic truth-tellers. Besides, we already have the needed authorization—and even enough funding to send 21,500 additional troops. It seems quite clear that the additional troop decision was made without any formal input from the intelligence community. There would be no NIE on “Probable Reactions to Various Courses of Action With Respect to Iraq”—no formal paper that could make the president’s decision appear highly questionable. Let the on-again-off-again NIE on prospects for Iraq languish. And let former CIA director, now Secretary of Defense Robert Gates pretend, as he did on Jan. 12 before the Senate Armed Services Committee, that he is “unaware” of the existence of an NIE draft on prospects for Iraq. Sen. John Warner, R-Va., raised the subject with Gates, saying that Negroponte had assured him the NIE would be issued at the end of the month. Don’t hold your breath.

Ray McGovern chaired NIEs and prepared the President’s Daily Brief during his 27-year career as a CIA analyst. He now works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C.
© 2007 Tom Paine